My Father Orders Kasha Varnishkes From Bain’s Deli at the Deptford Mall Food Court

A gut bomb, heavy and dry,
if not outright, like most of his meals, burned.

His plate of egg noodles is outnumbered
by our pizza slices dabbed with grease, or

Mom’s chicken, the starched mounds of rice
slick with citrus and sugar. We look past comfort,

regard his bow ties as another unquestioned quirk
and I’m five years old again walking into our kitchen

to my father scooping out the entire container of Daisy
into a bowl of sliced bananas. I do not ask.

The television’s blue fills his face. He’s not watching,
doesn’t notice the program’s changed. It’s 8:00 p.m.

Do you know where your children are?
His mouth works the buckwheat, toothsome,

crumbled over the plate: the shoveling of dirt,
crossing a continent to escape grime,

a sickle of earth beneath the fingernails, a story
summed up as fire and pogrom, steam

presses and a tenement in Philadelphia
where he remembers the proper thickness

of rolls, the thin slices of lox or the carp
his mother kept in the bathtub on Snyder Avenue,

the hammer she would use—there’s a dent in the door where
his head would have been. His mouth works

and for the moment, the fish are still swimming.

____

Jared Beloff is the author of Who Will Cradle Your Head and the co-editor of Poets of Queens 2. He is the Editor in Chief of Porcupine Literary. He is a teacher who lives in Queens, New York with his wife and two daughters.